Spring is the busiest season at Baker City’s Mount Hope Cemetery.

Each year, usually starting around April 1, the city’s maintenance contractor spends about two weeks focusing on the cemetery, in the city’s southeast corner off South Bridge Street.

The goal is to have the expanses of grass lush and green in time for Memorial Day weekend.

“We do a big clean up here in the spring so we are more prepared for Memorial Day when we have probably the largest number of visitors,” said Michelle Owen, the city’s public works director.

Prior to the clean up, the city asks people to temporarily remove flowers and other decorative items from graves and headstones, as certain items, particularly loose ones, can make the job tougher for workers with riding lawnmowers, string trimmers and other equipment.

“It just gives us an opportunity to kind of take things off the graves and then we can do a once over and trim around things and do some of that clean up work,” Owen said.

This year, for instance, the city sent out a notice asking people to remove such items by April 1.

The clean up campaign was set from April 1-15, and starting April 16, residents were again invited to return flowers and other items to graves.

The city’s contractor, HnT Lawn Care Inc. of Baker City, collected items that hadn’t been removed before April 1. Those that weren’t perishable, such as flowers, or in poor condition, will be stored at the cemetery, where people can claim them, until Nov. 1, 2022.

Owen said the contractor keeps track of removed items, organizing them by section, to make it easier for relatives or friends to retrieve and return them to the proper grave.

Eric Pierce, who owns HnT Lawn Care, said he and his crew, during the spring clean up, strive to pull out dead grass and move the larger decorations.

He said coins, which are often left on headstones, are left.

Rocks, which are sometimes left on Jewish graves, can be a problem.

“We can’t really have rocks out there. Because when they do get off the headstone, they hurt our lawnmowers,” Pierce said. “So we have to pick the rocks up.”

He said workers try to leave as many decorations as possible, and they treat all items with respect, including those that are removed and either stored or discarded.

Pierce said it’s a considerable task to care for Mount Hope with its acres of grass, along with many trees and shrubs.

“Just keeping it green,” Pierce said.

The contractor also tries to keep ground squirrel populations under control.

The job can be even more challenging during droughts, when the city reduces water use, including at the cemetery and city parks.

During summer, when the grass grows rapidly, Pierce said his crews are mowing at Mount Hope at least four times per week, and using string trimmers around gravestones five days a week.

About Mount Hope

The property has served as a cemetery since the 19th century, originally as private property but later becoming city property.

The cemetery contains more than 15,000 marked graves. A searchable database of burial records is available on the city’s website at http://bakercity.com/2153/Cemetery.

The city also sells grave sites — more than 4,000 of the approximately 17,000 available spaces have been reserved.

The city, as of July 1, 2022, will charge $451 for a standard space, and $933 for perpetual care of the space. A standard burial costs $805.

The city uses the money to maintain the cemetery.

The cemetery department also has two trust funds that provide much of the money to care for Mount Hope.

The larger fund, the Mount Hope Trust Fund, contains about $500,000.

The second is the John Schmitz Memorial Fund, which contains about $277,000. Schmitz was a Baker City businessman who left the city the money, asking that it be used only at the cemetery.

Over the years the city has used money from the Schmitz Fund for a variety of purposes, including building a paved lane in the cemetery named Schmitz DRive.

Although the city owns the cemetery, the property is split into more than a dozen sections, including the Catholic (one of the older parts of Mount Hope, with many 19th century graves), Masonic, Odd Fellows, Elks and Eagles.

The cemetery also has a special section reserved for veterans.